Unlike many other computer museums, the exhibited computers were almost all up and running, and volunteers and staff encouraged you to play around with them, even the IBM mainframes. You could even get remote access to the computers for telnet or ssh!
LCM's indefinite closure was announced not too long ago in the CoViD era, but fits with a longer pattern. Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
However, Allen's main business Vulcan (https://www.vulcan.com ) continues and remains locally famous as a commercial real estate developer and Amazon's main landlord in Seattle.
This is devastating, not just for computer geeks in Seattle, but all over the world. The LCM was one of a kind.
I organize an annual developer conference [1], and one of the highlights of my life was renting this place out and inviting ~400 fellow devs to spend the night playing with mainframes & vintage PCs [2] and signing karaoke.
I was at that cascadia conference and getting to visit LCM was the most amazing and unexpected treat I could have ever imagined. It was an entire evening of geeked out bliss. I can't thank you enough for making that happen. The talks were all great but this for me was the highlight of the conference.
> Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
I'd hope if she doesn't want to support a computer history museum any more, she might at least donate the historical assets to somewhere like the Computer History Museum in California? (If they even have room to store them all...)
Personally, I hope that someone acquires the museum as a whole and relocates it further up into downtown. The current location is in SoDo amongst a bunch of warehouses, with a crummy parking lot and is not very well served by transit. It'd be a great complement to something like Seattle Center, in downtown near Westlake Park / monorail, or even somewhere on/near the UW campus.
The corresponding increase in rent / real estate costs / property taxes might not be great for its solvency, though. Not only is it several floors of exhibits, there's also a huge basement full of the rest of the collection.
My wife and I have many good memories playing checkmo against a beautifully maintained PDP-8 At the museum. She just yelled out a genuine “No!” when I relayed the closure.
At one point they kept a binder of photos of victorious players.
We never made that binder and I guess we never will.
For anyone in tech visiting Seattle, this was always my first recommendation.
The hardest part about history is that human minds are unwilling to grasp the 'realness' of it. Being able to directly touch and play with the past reality really makes you appreciate how we arrived at modern computers.
They seemed to do what no other (perhaps very few) places have done; have real vintage machines accessible via the internet[1].
I know there are still real-hardware microcomputer BBS's (the C64 scene is arguably the biggest), but is there ANY other place that puts real big iron on the internet?
As a retro computer nerd, I hope these machines aren't silent in their storage units, and will one day again roam the internet with their descendents.
Does anyone have any ideas as to why Jody seems to be... betraying Paul's legacy, for lack of a better word? The only eccentric public indulgence of his that looks like it's going to survive is the MoPop museum, but that's because it's self sustaining.
It sounds like beyond MoPop and some of the brain research work, the legacy was not to be operating his projects, but rather giving away his fortune for causes.
I wish Cinerama was self-sustaining... and LCM is a huge loss... but I suppose they aren't 100-year institutions as they were created by Paul, but rather, showing us what is posible.
Maybe those giraffe bones and penguin skulls were cursed. Or maybe she was using them for a spell, to curse other people? The world will never know: it's all under NDA now.
I had no idea it was being shut down, that place was really one of a kind. I think there are few places where you could see a running Alto. The scope of what was there and the breadth of what was running was simply incredible.
Sounds like it won't make a return which is truly heartbreaking.
Very sad to see them shut their doors. When I was writing a blog article on using the Unix command line, they gave me access to their PDP-11 running Version 7 as well as a VAX 11/780 running BSD Unix - completely free.
Was a bit of magic that made my day since I hadn't used either platform in, of course, a very long time.
Man this makes me sad. I got a membership about a year ago with the intention of bringing along some friends (after visiting with family), but looks like that won’t be happening.
Playing Oregon Trail on some oooold machines was good.
What? No! I've been there last year during my Seattle internship and it was the most amazing experience having grown up after most of the machines exhibited were around.
There have to be some philantropists around who got rich in computing and have an interest in keeping it alive.
It is one of a kind, I was raving about it to everyone. I'd be happy to donate even though it's across the world from me.
>"I'd be lying if I didn't shed a tear when turning Rosencrantz (the VAX, running perpetually for a decade) off, wondering when it would run again."
This is truly sad -- VAX (at least the early ones where the CPU was implemented as cards with discrete electronic components) was the last truly transparent hardware...
This is a real shame. I moved to Seattle at the beginning of COVID and never got to take a look before it closed. Hopefully they’ll be back, maybe in a new location?
Edit: Maybe some tech exec with enough money that the museum's expenses are a drop in the bucket could help?
I moved here about five years ago, learned about the museum about a year ago. I now regret not finding time to visit, I'd assumed it'd always be there.
Similar story for me (I don't live in Seattle but I go there every few months). Except...last year we did a family trip where we needed for reasons to split the family for a day. So I used my free day to visit the museum with my oldest son. Feeling pretty lucky now to have had that somewhat random chance to visit. Also the bagel place next door wasn't bad.
This is very sad news indeed. For years I have longed to visit this museum.
I hope that they choose to reopen or that it can be purchased and turned into a more sustainable operation. I would gladly donate at least $1000 to such a cause if a viable proposal could be formed...
They have multiple phones hooked up to these old switches. After explaining the machine the tour guide picked up a handset, dialed a number and you'd hear "clickety clickety whir whir" and see these mechanical bars move around and the other phone would start ringing. You'd pick it up and have a conversation. Really magnificent. They had two 1960s video phones and you could have a conversation across the room.
There's a constant humming of belts and mechanical clicking, it's this really unique and distinct experience. Not many people were there the day I went so it was just me and a friend on what felt like a private tour. Very intimate. The guide was an old homebrew computing club member, extremely competent.
Also if this is your thing, Berlin has a computer gaming museum which is also amazing called Computerspielemuseum.
The living computer museum was just too good to be true. I hope it comes back. They had a Xerox Alto and an Apple 1 you could use. Just walk up and start typing away.
I had read a lot about the Xerox machines but I never used one. So it was just extraordinary to try all the things I've read about, it was like meeting a celebrity. The kludgy copy and paste before dragging was "invented", the VisiOn style menus, the clunky scrolling without scrollbars, all there.
They even encouraged you to program on punch cards to feed into some 1960s era machines they had running, including a CDC super computer. Or you could go use Unix on a teletype terminal and see the reams of paper pass by.
I had read Tracy Kiddals Soul of a New Machine about the Data General Eagle Computer, but I never thought I'd see one in person, just sitting there waiting for me to interact with it.
Or that I'd ever have a chance to just lounge on the couch of a Cray XMP.
The only things missing were foreign machines. No acorn or omron or any of the Soviet clones but if you set that aside, just great (unless there was a room off to the side dedicated to them that I missed... Quite possible)
As long as I'm plugging museums here's my short list: Imperial War Museum and the British Library, London, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City.
Every 5 feet of all of those is just shocking in what famous and wonderful artifacts they have. Philadelphia's is world class, better than the MET, better than the Smithsonian, don't pass on it if you get the opportunity
Seconding how incredible the Connections telecom history museum is. I'm scared for them too, as they're definitely on a shoestring compared to the LCM -- I think they were only open one day a week and staffed heavily (if not completely) by volunteers.
They also have annoying power requirements (48v, 1000A) to run all of the legacy phone equipment, making it even more difficult to move. Their current landlord provides that to them as they are taking up the top floors of a phone company switch office (building was built for old gear which took up a lot more space and power).
Hi there! Connections Museum volunteer here. We're on good terms with our landlords (CenturyLink). While we are 100% volunteer run, we also are part of an independent non-profit, the Telecommunications History Group.
We've been keeping busy during quarantine, working on all kinds of restoration projects, and look forward to being able to give tours when that's safe again. For now you'll have to get by with our youtube channel.
And our power draw is more in the neighborhood of 200A than 1000A :) With respect to moving, the greater challenges are that everything is hard-wired together (not connectorized) and we'd need a space with 13+ foot ceilings that allows high floor loading.
To clarify, Jody Allen took over Paul Allen’s fortune when he passed. I’m unsure what all has been closed since then, I know at least Stratolaunch (a space firm), Vulcan Productions (a small-ish media company), and now Vulcan Entertainment (LCM, Cinerama, and the flying heritage and combat museum) have all closed.
The Museum of Pop Culture (preciously Experience Music Project + Science Fiction Museum) was spared - they’re technically self funded now.
It feels like she’s cleaning house. COVID definitely didn’t help but Cinerama closed for a “remodel” sometime last year and laid off all their staff.
One correction: Stratolaunch hasn't closed. Vulcan sold it last year to Cerberus Capital Management [1], the private-equity firm that controlled Chrysler before it merged with Fiat. But it continues to operate with the same management.
As nasty as something like this made them look, what is being discussed here makes it not unreasonable. They liked being partners with Allen but were worried about his heirs having control of their company as they might have taken it in a direction Allen wouldn't have approved.
I feel incredibly sad that I never visited this museum while I could, and won’t be able to bring family and friends to visit it in the future. Hoping someone somehow will find a way to revive it again.
Very sad :( I remember having the chance to go there and meet amazing people (one of them worked on the first micro kernel) being able to see a real PDP working ... I don't get why bill gates would not back up his friend s old project :(
Unlike many other computer museums, the exhibited computers were almost all up and running, and volunteers and staff encouraged you to play around with them, even the IBM mainframes. You could even get remote access to the computers for telnet or ssh!
LCM's indefinite closure was announced not too long ago in the CoViD era, but fits with a longer pattern. Since the 2018 passing away of its creator, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, his sister and estate executor Jody Allen has been unwinding many of their diverse businesses and philanthropies for a more narrow focus, theoretically in line with his hope to give most of his wealth away after his death.
However, Allen's main business Vulcan (https://www.vulcan.com ) continues and remains locally famous as a commercial real estate developer and Amazon's main landlord in Seattle.